Because in the movies, you aren't partaking in the violence. So you aren't being encouraged to kill, or maim, and not face consequences. You aren't enjoying killing in movies.
I think they should with movies, too. But I think it should be broken into catagories.
FWIW, I tried this experiment and it's not all it's cracked up to be. My personal conclusion was that ratings work only because they are vague. The more specific they are, the more they reveal plot, which means people who want suspense (often the point of a movie) can't get it. "Does he boink her at the end?" is kind of a pointless question to ask when the rating is "explicit, unmarried sex between a guy and a girl". "does this sci-fi movie end badly?" is kind of pointless when the rating is "nuclear devices deployed in this movie". Ultimately, a complete description of the plot is the only clear rating, and is a real spoiler. The hyperlink above goes to some uses of my ratings, click here for a key to the ratings. Obviously, this wasn't a scientific experiment, it was just for fun. But because I had no serious preconceived end in mind, I had an open mind and learned a lot.
If I'm wrong, and it turns out that video games do damage children, then I'd be first in line to regulate their sale.
The problem is you won't turn out to be right or wrong. You'll be both alleged right and alleged wrong because each side will pay for biased studies. It's not that good science is not done, it's that bad science is done, too.
See Ron Rivest's very interesting paper on chaffing and compare his theory of security through what amounts to a formalized and theoretically sound notion of smokescreen with the way the market is going.
I think in the end it will be something where people make up their minds and we just have to vote and hope. But I would hope we vote for freedom if we're unsure because freedoms lost are hard to get back. There probably is some occasional effect of violence in movies against weak minds, but the effect of lost freedom is not without tangible cost and I weigh the latter more heavily in my own book of public accounting. No scientific survey will ever sort that out.
For most of us, though, video games still come down to choice. Does letting someone pull a trigger not also let them not pull it? Rather than removing violence, maybe we should focus more on seeing the consequence of violence. In the studies I've chosen to believe (heh), the idea of consequence-free violence is closer to the root of problems than the mere choice of violence.
The Sims, for example, is full of ways to torture people to death with no consequence to the player. I might argue that practice, bloodless as it is, was worse than a game with guns that lets you rescue a princess or save a hostage or a nation, which some might argue instills basic values.
And what about movies, which offer no choice but force you to just ride the course. How is this better than sitting in a movie where you want the violence to stop but can't make it stop without leaving the people you came with. At least a video game gives you a choice at each moment.
It might be kinda cool, actually, if some movies were more videogame-like and you could press a button saying "no more of this kind of scene please" and it would dynamically tone things down for either just you or for the whole of an audience if everyone voted likewise... Then seeing the movie multiple times would give you a different experience every time, too, which would be great for the movie houses...
Recently, watching the Da Vinci Code movie, I marveled at how we have movies
that allow PG-13 to contain "disturbing violent images" but only mild sex. There's a lot of
sex not in that movie that's in the book. But the violence that was only passing in the book
is really graphic in the movie. My conclusion was that the government cares only about limiting
sex and not violence. p>
Now I read here that the government cares about violence in video games. Why not in movies?
It's the random way in which the government incoherently stabs us with little points of pain rather than ever creating any notion of consistent policy that troubles me way more than just whether they want ratings on video games or not.
I wouldn't care if they rated all video games heavily for sex and violence, and then left it to the market what to buy. But when they rate some but not all, regulate some but not all, what's the point? The only obvious result I see is the eventual strangulation of all US business by litigation.
The fundamentals of the patent system is to protect the author's idea and inventions
Actually, the patent system does not protect ideas. No intellectual property does. The patent system protects a way of doing something useful and novel as a way of incentivizing
creation. The problem is that ways of doing things are being cranked out so fast that their very speed of being cranked out is a prove of non-novelty, yet people are capitalizing them economically as if they were a proof of "infringement", which they often are not. That an idea about how to do something is easy to recreate should be proof of non-novelty and a defense against infringement, not a source of income. And that's why the software patent system is broken: because in the digital marketplace, a lot of the good algorithms are practically forced. It's like giving patents on addition and subtraction, when you know these ideas would come anyway.
I agree that software patents are an unnecessary headache, but I think it's because software patents are just different than things like material process patents,
and I propose dealing with them very differently, more like the Nobel prizes, but I'm not so sure I have a strong position on patents in general, as long as they run in a reasonable period of time and don't start doing like copyrights where they keep getting extended all the time to last closer and closer to forever.
It bugs me though, that people move so fluidly between discussions of software patents and discussions of GPL as if it were all one kind of thing. Copyrights are protections of work done, and the likelihood that two people will write the same software system is close to zero, so there's little harm in protecting the expression of someone's program. If they want to let someone use it, let them. If they don't, let that person write something else.
I don't see that someone's copyright protection infringes the world, since recreation of an idea in another form is not an infringement, only direct copying. It's the fact that patents make even independent creation into an offense that makes it a problem where copyright is not. People who need to get around a copyright can just head to a clean room and work their way through. People who need to get around a patent can't even claim as a defense "we raised the authors on Alpha Centauri and they never heard of this patent, so couldn't have infringed it". In fact, I suspect the whole patent system will necessarily collapse as soon as we open trade relations with another intelligent race, who will surely have a different theory of what has and has not been invented and will think different things to have "prior art" (not to mention different things to be "obvious"). When is First Contact scheduled for again?
This is the same as trusting the newspapers, tv sound bytes and what celebrities say
Yes, it's true. It's always been true that we've trusted things we heard from well-known places. But in the past, we couldn't amplify that very much beyond ourselves. In the modern world, the issue isn't just "how much do you believe" but "how much effect can you have?". Because you can read something flakey on one site, launder the source of the info, appear to be a new source and accidentally confirm the information, that's bad. Because you can start a grassroots national campaign for the impeachment or promotion of someone, that's bad (if based on falsehoods). And so on. People in the past had to work harder.
It's something like the question of spam. People always had the possibility of flooding your mailbox with spam even in the physical world. The problem isn't that the net added this capability, it's that it changed the economics of it. And that is new. So people who fear the effect are not just repeating the same old fears, they have legitimate new ones.
Even if you conquer Zero Gee with Artificial Gravity, you haven't entirely solved the Toilets in Space problem. Especially when it comes to filling stations in space. After all, filling stations on earth often don't have the cleanest toilets. How are we going to keep them cleaner in space?
Wait, don't say it! I'm one orbit ahead of you... Illegal aliens: Doing the jobs our astronauts (and filling station attendants) won't do.
The problem with a DNA database is that everytime they run a search against it, everyone in the database is a suspect.
Actually, a bigger problem (not to take away from your point, but to underscore it) is that everyone not in the database is not a suspect. So when you hear them say they have it "narrowed down to two people", of course they mean "it's either these two or perhaps 6 billion not on record, or even 1 million of those who might match all they searched for". But you just know they're going to spend more time harassing those they have data on than on the other 1 million that would have matched if they were on file, too.
On the other hand, I think it's inevitable that these databases will happen. At some level, I'd rather we start moving ahead to create laws on how such info can and cannot be used than worrying about stopping the inevitable. Perhaps that's giving up. But it's practical.
Rather than telling insurance companies they can't have the data, I'd rather say they cannot discriminate in how they use it. Because at least then we can start to take statistical data on who they deny insurance to or who they fail to pay quickly and we can start to see if they are being fair. As long as this is secret, then only they can know if they are discriminating, since it becomes a "risk" to give a watchdog organization the data they should be watching for, and that's a problem right in oversight...
Why jocks should grow up to program computers
on
Do You Have a PC Posture?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Let me say first that I distinguish RSI from carpal tunnel in a basic way. I think RSI is a problem that is going to happen regardless of posture and that is just about the simple question of whether any signal we send to repetitively through our system is bad for us. I think people become open to RSI because of the R, the repetition, and we should be wary of tasks that ask people to become machines. "People are good at judgment. Machines are good at repetition." People should not be doing the tasks of machines.
But carpal tunnel is very different. I have had friends fall victim to this, and I've seen them point to all manner of things to deny what seems totally obvious to me, and yet what I see no press play about: A lot of people who spend their time at a desk are not football players. They have not trained themeselves for years to be strong. That's just an observation, not a criticism. The weakest among us often prefer desk jobs. And some of them end up victim to the fact that desk jobs have their physical stresses.
At the risk of angering my insurance company, I should say that for 30 years I've sat with posture that is not perfect. I've rested my hands on my desk. I've worked long hours. And my typing is fine. Yet others I've known haven't survived 2 years of light typing. Why the difference? I can't believe it's typing.
Looking around at those who do and those who don't, I see weak-wristed people who have problems and strong-wristed people who don't. What did I do as a kid? I swam (with my arms, never kicking enough) competitively for a number of years. I bowled, using at least one wrist heavily. And I played baseball--again sport that uses the wrist. I played volleyball (lots of wrist there) and ping-pong (same). I did tetherball (very strong wrist use). And I loved the horizontal bar (pullups, and pulling my whole body over the bar). It doesn't surprise me, then, that as an adult, my wrists had nice broad cord strength going through whatever the bone structure was there. My arms were always very strong, and it's served me well programming. Probably plenty for a robust typing life.
If you're a kid, or you know one, or have one, who wants to be into computers, I recommend sports. And particular those sports--the ones about wrists. I just don't see the problem. Then again, typing itself from an early age may well build a generation of kids whose bones grow up knowing they'll need this strength. So it may just be those who are late to learn typing that end up with the problem. Still, a bit of swimming and those other things won't have hurt you any...
Maybe what I'm advocating is less PC style posture, and more Mac-style posture, since the Mac commercials seem to be more about getting out and doing physical things with your computer on your belt...
I've taken no offense what so ever to this conversation.
Sorry, but everyone seems to take offense at everything here, so I've learned to just assume I should worry, and to write very defensively. Sigh. Glad to know there are others besides myself here who just come to offer and receive information, not to fight.
Some reasons I would not recommend scheme besides maintainence costs are:
1. Speed for some things, but if that's not important then it doesn't matter, though with Scheme you can always write the performance critical pieces in C or C++ and write an extension.
Likewise with Lisp if you needed it, you could always write a few subroutines in C/C++
and there are packages for doing "foreign" (some say it should be called "native") callout
very straightforwardly. e.g., although Lisp will do array processing, if I had routines already
optimized for doing (un)compression, display algorithms, raster effects, numerical algorithms,
etc. I might just call those directly. The modern environment is heterogeneous, and the good implementations of CL accomodate that even though the standard stops short. It's enough similar that if you have to share between multiple implementations or you write in one and later port to another, it's likely to be a pretty modular accommodation.
2. Lack on an object system.
CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System) is pretty much the reference model for a good object
system based on multiple inheritance. It's powerful, efficient, and flexible.
3. I'll talk about the maintainence costs again. Pyton, perl and other interpretted languages seem better at catching errors when loading the source code. This may just be the implementation of Scheme I have used (ELK). This definitely does not say anything about LISP.
I haven't used ELK so can't compare directly. In general, the Scheme standard is small and what made it usable was often the implementation details. (CL is bigger, so more of its usable stuff is common to all implementations, but even then, there are new things that are post-standard that are common to most implementations, yet really not standard.) Scheme has traditionally placed more of a premium on aesthetics and teachability, while CL more explicitly on the reverse (practicality over aesthetics). Traditionally, it has been individual Scheme vendors, rather than the language itself, that have had to tend to pragmatics, which has left some Scheme implementations hugely more usable than others. Common Lisp has been traditionally pragmatic, so the individual implementations, while they do vary somewhat, also tend to care about commonality more because that sense of shared community is built into the language itself. (I sat on both the Scheme authors committee for a number of years and on the CL design committee, so it gave me an interesting view of the differences, but I'm always fascinated to hear how users perceive it, since they often don't see either the intent or the process, just the effect.)
4. The exception mechanism is very rough. Error recovery in general is funny, though you can write your own very elegant error handling mechanisms.
If you want a flavor of what the Common Lisp condition system offers, you could see
my 1990 paper
and
my 2001 paper, each of which touch on this in different ways.
5. Lack of data structures such as O(log(n)) maps and sets, though you can roll your own...
There are fewer Common Lisp programmers than Java programmers, to be sure. And sometimes they may be harder to find and/or more expensive if you're just measuring per-person without regard to how the language enables one. But a well-written large program in Common Lisp will be more flexible and more easily maintained by fewer people than an equivalent large program in another language, at least in my experience. So I personally think the comparison is quite favorable.
Some have said that there are good and bad programmers in all languages, and that may well be true. But then, I've heard very few good programmers in Common Lisp complain that the language ties their hands and that they wish they were using a "conventional" language; by contrast, I've heard the reverse (good programmers complaining that C/C++/Java ties their hands and they wish they were using Lisp) many times. Again, it could just be who I hang around with. I offer it only as something I've observed, not as incontrovertible fact.
But if I like a language, I'm not going to fail to recommend it just because others might disagree. Let the others who might disagree fail to recommend it. If a language's advocates don't speak for it, who will? I wasn't trying to start a language war, so much as surprised that you noted you had personally successfully used a language and yet wouldn't recommend it. I'm not even saying there can't be reasons for that--I was just curious what yours were.
I think the remarks others have made about cross-platform issues are good ones, but I would add to that one other important comment: Don't make a big fuss about why not to use VB unless you're prepared to offer a substitute. If you do have a substitute, focus on its good qualities rather than on VB's bad ones. Show what additional things you could do if only you had that other choice. Sounds more positive that way.
I do a lot of Scheme too, but I'd be an idiot to recommend that to you!
Common Lisp is industrial strength, scales well to large applications, and works cross-platform. For example, LispWorks offers a Common API (CAPI) that allows writing portable code for deploy on Mac/Windows/Linux.
It is much more analogous to selling a car with a faulty brake system. Then you buy a separate braking system from another company.
Mostly I agree with your sentiment here, but on this particular comment, I wanted to note that there's a material difference between buying it from another company and from the same company. In the case of two companies, the first company can claim the things the second company is fixing are not things they knew about or thought of, and in so doing they might have some sort of vestige of a defense against claims they are negligent for not fixing it in their original product. In the case of the care being provided by the same company, the problem is that Windows already sells this facility, since the Windows Update facility presumably gets frequent security updates.
If you'd get all the same patches anyway, and you're just paying for getting them instantly instead of waiting for a daily polling mechanism, maybe that's reasonable. But if they're actually making a conscious decision "let's not give this fix out for free, let's hold it back from our normal distribution mechanism because people should have paid us more for this kind of protection", there it seems like users should be lining up to sue every time there's a fix that they can't get throught Windows Update and it leads to material damage.
Unlike in the case of two uncoordinated vendors, it would seem like it would be easier to show there was a conscious decision by Microsoft to withhold a fix, and although I'm not a lawyer, that sounds to me like it would make a big difference to jurors considering a liability case.
I've got to say, I have trouble with charging content providers even once, so I completely agree with this criticism of the proposed "revenue enhancing" technologys for the megacorps.
I used to post commentary to Salon's TableTalk until they changed their revenue policy to charge people who posted stuff for the right to post. People who posted stuff? They're a magazine. It seems absurd to charge writers but not subscribers. So I left. Obviously it didn't bring the empire down, but my point was to say "look, I'm not going to pay two ways: one by providing content and another by providing money to have that content delivered". People come to the site to read posts, and they charge advertisers for that. Getting readers is enough payment for me.
Similarly here, I think it's amazing that if you have a web site that is full of content, the internet has no mechanism to make sure you are economically rewarded. The promise of micropayments for having put up very elaborate sites full of information was never carried through because the big portal sites realized they could just take all that money for themselves--why pass it through? No one cares that it's my or your commentary that people are getting out of their browser. They just thank AOL or MSN or Google for finding it for them. And we who provide the myriad little details, blogs, maps, lists, and other things that make up the real fabric of the internet are not only not rewarded but are charged.
So when you talk about double-charging for that privilege, not single-charging, at some point I have to say everyone should go read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in which something very similar occurs, and what amount to "content providers" eventually say "enough is enough". Ayn Rand is controversial for her overall broad philosophy of Objectivism, which lots of people don't buy into wholesale. But I'm not advancing Objectivism here. I'm just saying the basic premise of the book, that sometimes enough is enough, is worth considering. The book is an interesting read regardless of your position on her larger scale philosophies.
And I'm all for creating reasonable fees on the Internet. I just don't think authors and other content providers should be charged for doing so. That's the very definition of not reasonable. Sort of like having kids charge their parents for raising them. Or charging teachers for the privilege of teaching. If no one reads the content someone provides, the cost of that content approaches zero since it's just a few bytes on an unused disk. If lots of people read them, then by definition the content contributes a lot to the world, and the world should contribute by each consumer chipping in, not by each consumer contributing to the content provider's eventual bankruptcy (or in less severe cases just negatively contributing to their financial success).
Also, I like Jesse Ventura's "government should do for people what they cannot do for themselves". The big portal companies are already capable of a great many sins; the mere presence of money enables that. What the law needs to protect are the individual content providers, who are not capable of protecting themselves because often they are denied (or made to work unreasonably hard for) any revenue stream from their efforts. If there's a need for a law, it's to protect the little guy, not to enable the big one.
The cause is no child left behind and like action.
I couldn't agree more. I've witnessed the effect first-hand. Not to detract from anything you had to say there, but hopefully instead to underscore and amplify it...
The truly sad thing is that politicians are not doing the math. The only thing that even allows this ridiculous fantasy that it's appropriate to focus resources on those left behind is that we haven't quite run out of money yet. But just wait...
Dollars invested at the high end (of achievers, I mean, not dollars invested on the well-to-do) pays back because those people will be able to get and keep jobs that will pay for whatever welfare we can afford. So that money is not wasted. What is wasted is failing to invest in making sure that those who could easily succeed really can, because that's leaving easily affordable productivity on the table. As more and more US students can't cut it in college, our colleges turn to teaching more and more people from abroad... for now... until we have no one left in the US with the knowledge needed to do the teaching. Then that, too, will collapse.
Education is supposed to be an investment, and it is not being treated as our largest strategic asset. It's being wasted as if it were non-threatening to do that.
And please note: I'm not saying to spend no money on the disadvantaged. I'm saying that there's a difference between "spending a modest amount to make sure that people who are within striking distance of succeeding can really succeed" and "spending every last dollar to make give those with really no hope of ever succeeding have the illusion that they got the same chance as everyone else".
(And note, I don't think we do as well as we could in helping to teach those who "no matter how many times it is presented to them cannot grasp it". I put a lot of that on the teachers and the school system, not just the students. But "just money" nor "catchy slogans" will fix it. There may be too few good teachers for all the school districts, and maybe a heap of bad ones protected here and there under tenure, but debating that seems to get us nowhere. There is an Internet now and we could be experimenting more with centralizing the creation of good lectures (not just lecture materials, but actual presentations, assignments, and even grading) such that everyone could have access to a substantial amount of help at very low incremental cost. Just as colleges have a professor do the teaching and then grad students handle the questions/answers, I think the public schools could invest a bit more in such tools. Yes, some teaching has to be personally dealt with, but if teacher prep time were reduced, and grading were centralized, the human teachers in the classroom would have more time to deal with special needs of Those Left Behind as well as those with extra questions trying to get ahead. Right now that time is frittered away replicating the basics (what will I say tomorrow? when will I get time to grade this?) in ways that the programmers among us would never permit programs we write to fritter away time in a production application... Also, those students who didn't "get it" on the first pass could watch again that evening with their parents instead of complaining they didn't hear what the teacher said and parents having no recourse. There is a lot we don't do technologically. But none of that will get done by just throwing money at the lower end and calling it by the catchy but misguided and misleading title No Child Left Behind.)
Realistic choices need to be made because the math of national economics will ultimately not lie. Some might argue that it's already not lying and that already the finances of this are hopelessly out of control. But whether we can turn around this particular unbelievable deficit/debt bubble or not, it's clear that if we continue to give away all that we have to people who are not putting back their fair share and we continue not to invest in people who can pay for the extravagance of that gift-giving, a reckoning will come.
With this kind of shrinkage, it sounds like a much worse problem than ozone layer depletion. Perhaps it's the effect of ever-increasing television and cell phone broadcasts over the past few decades, eroding our protection from the total vacuum of space. It sounds dangerous to me.
Time to write my Congressfolk and ask them if they have a position on this... They'll know. They always seem to be on top of everything I write them about.
It would seem that sci-fi will never be anything other than what it is: a fiction
You must read different sci-fi than I do. I feel that sci-fi's purpose is to explore what might happen in the future, to include the problems. The only sci-fi story I've read about the skytower is Ben Bova's Mercury, and the author makes it plain early in the book (hence I think no "spoiler warning" is required here for me to remark on it) that his view of the skytower is... uh... not 100% rosy.
Stories, whether written in litereature or in TV or movies, are the implementation mechanism by which society plays out an idea in its head before doing something to see whether it likes where it goes. For the collective consciousness to work properly, and for society to move forward in an informed way, it has to be free to explore both the positive and negatives.
Doing great, noble, historical things is not accomplished by a blind rush toward the first thing that the Guiness book of records says has never been tried, but rather by stretching for things that are, with due thought, within our technical grasp... and socially proper. Nuclear weapons, for example, was arguably rushed through the approval process without due consideration for the social implications. Some might argue, and have argued, that a skytower might fall (so to speak) in the same category. SciFi is one of the most effective vehicles ever invented for exploring such questions.
Meanwhile, you might try attending any sort of non-professional convention - celebrities selling autographs is de rigueur.
I think I said pretty clearly that I expected there might be conferences where this was expected, so this refutes nothing of what I said.
What makes Stallman's position questionable is, when you cut away all the guff, that his underlying claim is based on the notion that there are "good" and "bad" ways to earn money. He holds himself out as someone who wants to be judged in this light and he will be judged differently by different people for what he does. But I think it's fair to impose a stricter standard upon him than on the average person on the street who's just trying to make a buck.
In this regard, one of Stallman's implicit claims is that "other people do it" or "I do it because I can" are not adequate defenses of why one makes money. Hence, if he will deny either of those to others, he must deny those defenses to himself. If "it's customary to charge money for software" is a good enough reason, a lot of the debate on free software would go away. So let him defend himself however he likes, but if it comes down to "other people do it", he's undermined his whole political movement.
What he seems to many to be saying is how people should structure a theory of economics from first principles. And so my arguments are from first principles. My argument on the California law was not "what does it give a person a right to" nor "whose right is defended", but rather "what are the material elements one must take into consideration in deciding such a case". The law extends protection to workers only in the case where various material considerations are satisfied. I looked to that law not for precedent in terms of outcome, but in terms of considered thought on material elements. Venue seems to me a material element.
In any case, my role here isn't to convince every last person nor even to assert there's a definitive answer, only to lay out an alternate point of view because I tire of these discussions being one-sided. I've done that, and I'll hold to that. Invite me to your conference sometime (for a fee, of course) and I'll debate it until the late hours with you. And if you can find me while I'm out in public milling about at that conference, incidentally, just mention that you read this post and the autograph I give you will be free.
Except you aren't paying for ALL of their time - if you had paid for every hour of RMS's time on the floor then you would have some claim to control his actions
It's reasonable to raise this, but I don't think this can be a dominating claim.
In any place of business, you pay workers for only a period of time. That doesn't mean that on premises they can set themselves up in a shop and capitalize on the people that have come to your business for their own economic gain. If I write a book "on my own time" while full-time employed and my employer isn't going to claim ownership, my contract says it has to be not just on my own time but on my own premises/equipment for it to be free and clear. (I'm pretty sure some places--the State of California [California Labor code section 2870] is an example--codify this obvious bit of common sense into law.)
The situation in a conference may be somewhat more gray, but not completely.
As someone who's been a speaker at a number of conferences, I know I have at least some responsibility to the venue not to work against what it is that they've brought me in for. It's common for book authors to sell their books (though I've never seen book authors charge for autographs--it's usually seen as a sales tool to encourage buying). Most conferences don't mind on-site sale of books because it serves attendees, but if a conference said "we don't want you selling your book here", I think it would be a reasonable request. (The most likely reasons would be traffic patterns, fire regulations [too many people], equity of investment, and overall happiness of the attending conference members--who if they get angry enough won't come back next year.) Most speakers would find it still well worth their time to conform to requests to avoid sales and simply raise visibility of their name/image.
There's probably a legal basis for saying the conference organizer's will should dominate, but even just appealing to common sense: If the people running the convention can't control how their convention runs, they can't assure its success or failure on their own terms, and are less likely to offer to host conventions. I would not begrudge Stallman for saying in advance that he was going to do this (though I would recommend that the conference advertise the fact in order to keep people who come from having their expectations violated). I would not begrudge him for saying he'd not want to be photographed. Or he might say meet me later offsite and I'll sign for you under my own terms. But in this latter case, the restaurant or hotel he directed them to might have their own rules. A small number of people exchanging money might not offend a hotel, but if you have lines around the lobby or building, they might insist that you rent a room to avoid clogging things for other people. Venue matters, and one cannot just set up a free enterprise on someone else's property (owned or rented).
Of course, these are just my opinions. I'm not saying I run the world. I'm saying that it's not surprising people objected. And I'm saying that to the extent that he thinks he has a moral cause to press, that moral cause is met by other moral causes pushing back. I'm just articulating the basic framework that some of those forces of pushing back might reasonably take.
I'm not sure it's entirely relevant to this discussion (so I've pre-emptively removed my automatic +1 Karma bonus), but since you ask:
I went to and worked at MIT, where I studied at and worked in the Lab for Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence lab. Appropriately for my tag line, I have a BS in Philosophy.
By way of appropriate disclosure:
Stallman's not a pal of mine, but I came out of the same environment as he did, with quite
different views on the world than he did. I contributed to early (Teco-based) Emacs and to
Lisp Machines, so we had various interactions over those.
I'm sometimes seen as opposing him personally, since my view often differs from his, but mostly I just seek to present an alternate point of view on a topic that calls for many voices and often doesn't get them.
I'm sometimes even accused of being a troll, but that's an oversimplification. I try hard to keep my arguments non-personal to the degree possible. Personalities and experience influence the details of this discussion greatly, so it's often necessary for us to discuss such matters. But we can't shy away from venturing opinions merely because personalities sometimes get mixed in. These are issues that objectively affect all of us, and understanding them involves not shying away from every angle of an issue where points of view do matter.
To my knowledge, there's no patent on gif decoding--only on the encoding. The patent is on gif creation. Lots of GPL'd tools accept gifs.
Count me in the camp that says "kleenex" when I mean "facial tissue". Hand me a "kleenex" doesn't mean I won't take a Scottie. Xerox may wish I didn't have that usage, but that's Xerox's problem, not mine.
Likewise I just use the term gif because it's easy to pronounce. (Yeah, I know, png is encouraged to be pronounced ping, but it doesn't mean people understand me when I do.) I didn't mean to exclude accepting.png's,.jpg's,.tiff's,.bmp's, or whatever you like, nor did I specify the output format.
Of course, it's like the GPL. He charges for the service of participating in the creation of the works, while the subsequent copying and distribution is Free[tm].
Of curiosity, do you know this in some authoritative way or are you speculating? I didn't see this stated in the article.
You could, I suppose, test this by making a GPL'd program (to eliminate red herring objections based on your market paradigm) that uses a picture of Stallman (with a rectangle missing) and merges a gif you give it of yourself to that photo, and then give your program away as freeware (perhaps for media-cost on a disk you brought to one of his events). Like with any free software, you could get your grins from trying to drive down the market price of the original idea to a more "tolerable" level... zero, being the canonical tolerable level.
His primary point (made in the article), that fans have no inherent right to his time is right in principle. However, when you make yourself available for an event and especially if you're already paid for the event, it gets more questionable. [Credential: I've hosted a conference at which RMS spoke. He wanted a fee, which I had no objection to. Where feasible, speakers should get paid for time and travel. There are fortunately speakers who sometimes have the resources and interest to travel and/or speak where they can't be reimbursed, but it's not an obligation on speakers. Speaking takes prep time and time to do. And, in my limited experience, Stallman rightly insisted on being reimbursed for such things.] But if he had arrived and started charging people at my event for his services while he was on "our time", I'd have found that to be "double billing" (at best) and would have strongly considered kicking him out on the street on the spot.
Perhaps the conference event people approved of his action in advance. Or perhaps they didn't think to object on this basis. I suspect there's also a question at a conference on free software whether it's "his" conference. It may be his topic, but the ownership of time and conferences is something where I'd follow the money. Perhaps the conference had him as their guest speaker and didn't want to offend him even when he offended them. I don't know the full fact pattern, so am substituting questions for people to ask in order to speak on the issue. But Stallman speaks as if this were simply an issue of signer's rights, he's oversimplifying by not similarly qualifying his advice to others according to forum/venue, which certainly influences any discussion of rights.
It'd be quite another thing entirely if this fee were asked on his own time (say, when someone finds him in a restaurant or hotel or out on the street where he's not already scheduled). I might then argue that the fee was too low. Fans should not have their right to inject themselves upon unwilling celebrity in their private lives. But I don't see that that's what's going on here.
I was going to say something similar, that is, that the only real way out is to pull a Dallas.
Star Trek's big contribution to the world is not about space stuff, it's about humanity:
It's not just the little morality plays of the first series. When they went to the big screen, they made the huge mistake of assuming we just all wanted to see a rehash of the same old faces, without the substance. The result was a seriously bad movie, unquestionably the worst of the Star Trek movies and arguably bad by many standards. Then they followed with one of the best movies of all time, not just best of Star Trek, best of any movie. It's in my all-time top-10.
Wrath of Kahn is not only an outstandingly well put together movie, but it broke ground on movies in a new way that, to my knowledge, had not been seriously done before, or not that effectively. Instead of treating the aging of a character as a weakness (as in Bond or Superman movies where they eventually replace the actor but always behave as if he does not age), they turned it to a strength and taught us about aging. They let the character's wisdom grow and they presented not just seasoned actors but characters befitting those seasoned actors.
To do it in reverse, is to return to the Bond/Superman fallacy--that what we want is more of the people. Sure we do, if we could. But their time has largely come and gone and we cannot go back. That was the message of the Star Trek movies. Life moves on, and you live with it.
To try to restart those characters is to ask for too much. It is to take no risks. Gene took a risk with Next Generation in going to a new crew, and showed the formula could survive the transition. But those entrusted with Gene's legacy didn't stick to formula in Enterprise, and now the studio has learned nothing and wants to simply return to clinging to straws rather than analyze the mistakes.
It's not inconceivable that a trip to Star Fleet academy could make an excellent series, but it's handicapped by trying to lock into Kirk and Spock. Get new characters.
What really killed Enterprise was a lack of purpose. I hope they reanalyze the purpose, or the "motive" as so many actors would say... "What's my motive?" The studio's motive seemed to be money and greed and milking a thought-naive audience, and the not-so-naive audience called them on it.
Star Trek took risks, but could reinvent itself weekly. Another thing Enterprise blew was that the new framework was so constraining (the long-arc time-travel story) that when it didn't work, there was no easy out. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Solicit stories from the community. Take some chances.
An academy might be about the unwritten future, except that we've already read the future. We know who will live and who will die unless there are new characters. That eliminates suspense. Enterprise also missed a huge chance to be funny. It presented a world before everything technological was debugged, and where the storylines might be as much about technical failure as success. But then it never used that. Will this new series really use its campus to its capability? It won't if it ties its hands too much with constraints of other series... Let it go free.
Odds are, this is just another plan to make more money for the registrars
I don't see how it could be otherwise.
First, the phone company already knows that the best way to index phone number is by soundex, to avoid massive problems caused by the fact that many people don't know the correct spellings of their friends' and associates' names. And they certainly aren't sounding like this will be the first domain indexed by soundex.
Second, it's unlikely that domain ownership will be a prerequisite to having a phone number. I don't think they could sell that. (In fact, they might realistically make more by saying they were going to give away the domain with your name and invent a service called... hmmm, let's see... how about the "unlisted domain" where the customer pays money to keep from being locatable.)
Third, phone numbers have the virtue of being uncorrelated with a name. That's what makes them resolvable in ambiguity--they act as a cross-check to make sure you got it right. When you can't quite remember a number and think it's either 555-1234 or 555-1235 and then check information to find the first is for "Sam Smith" and the second for "Alex Jones", there's little doubt how to resolve things. But if you thought the number was 1387.Sam.Smith.com or 1386.Sam.Smith.com or maybe 1387.Samuel.Smith.com or maybe 1386.Samuel.Smith or 1387.Sam.Smythe.com or... Obviously finding out that the mis-remembered number matches a lot of same-named people won't help at all. (If you believe in correlating names with telephones this way, it's a short conceptual hop to believing that a.pw domain would help you remember your password.)
If you can't autogenerate good phone numbers (i.e., tell people what name they're supposed to use), as I and many others here have argued you can't, what's the alternative? Allow people to choose? Gads, with all the domain squatting it's clear that this would allow much choice to a rich few and little choice to most people. And so it would not be fair at all. The fairest thing I can imagine is to not involve ICANN at all.
And besides, back to the original point about this being a ploy to sell domain registries, if I wanted to have the domain system already remember my phone number, why wouldn't I just have people do nslookup on the names I already own? They already require domain owners to list their phone numbers.
is that computational linguistics still hasn't been able to make reasonable progress into Pragmatics
Two quick points, one regular, one meta...
First, I wanted to say something more but didn't want to read all the posts to see if I was duplicating. So thank you for saying essentially the same thing as I was going to say. That is, that mostly this shows up the limitations of full text search and that I hope Google and others are investing in better forms of search. The whole point of full text search was to take un-marked-up text and just use it as is. Having to change your un-marked-up text to be "even less marked up" is the wrong way to go. Alta Vista and its successors were on the right track before by saying we must build tools that accomodate language as it is written and index it in spite of itself. This is no time to turn back.
Second, in the meta level, I was happy not to have to search the entire text of everything people wrote to find this. I just read all the level 5 posts (not many) and then scanned the unattached posts for an interesting headline that would give me the hint of someone describing the limits of computational linguistics. Your post, here titled "All this tell us..." was perfect to allow me to select its content on first try, avoiding a bunch of posts probably on other topics. But this header would be terrible for full text searches as currently implemented. Anyway, I thought it was great that this message and its subject itself were an existence proof of the claim that was made within the post.
Tools will continue to evolve, but the data we're searching is a static record. If we dumb down an entire culture to to accomodate our current tools, when we get better tools will one of them be something that un-dumbs-down the time period from 2005-2010 when we though dumbing things down was necessary? Or will it just look to people of the future like we had a sudden five year interval of being idiots?
The problem is, it implies changing the relationship with text, there is not a single text that is written and delivered to the reader, but some set of texts.
A good point and a fine concern. Then again, to speak in overly general terms, all news stories are written by the AP and then re-packaged by anything from the New York Times to USA Today to look like there was a different source. So in effect we offer the same service today. Every newstand offers, again to overly general round numbers, the same news from three different rewriters and people today are informed enough to know which lens they want to view that raw news through.
You're right in practice that what I'm suggesting offers much more refined control and many opportunities to lose one's place navigating. So I don't know, maybe it's not the right thing. Maybe what I'm suggesting is a regression to the days when my ATM used to ask me every day whether I was an English speaker, until some clever programmer figured out that I probably mostly speak the same language every day and then just remembered my answer once and didn't ask again. Maybe people who read the Times yesterday read it again today, and don't go back and forth between simple or advanced wordings on a moment by moment basis.
But then, the net has surprised us before about showing us that there are more use-cases than publishers ever expected. And by making the cost of trying the experiment low enough, we can bypass the wisdom of the big publishers and jump to the real truth of what end users want. So perhaps it's worth doing just because the cost of failure isn't inordinately high and the potentials if it shows something interesting are worth the modest effort involved.
Slashdot Mirror
A Clockwork Orange
Phew. :)
FWIW, I tried this experiment and it's not all it's cracked up to be. My personal conclusion was that ratings work only because they are vague. The more specific they are, the more they reveal plot, which means people who want suspense (often the point of a movie) can't get it. "Does he boink her at the end?" is kind of a pointless question to ask when the rating is "explicit, unmarried sex between a guy and a girl". "does this sci-fi movie end badly?" is kind of pointless when the rating is "nuclear devices deployed in this movie". Ultimately, a complete description of the plot is the only clear rating, and is a real spoiler. The hyperlink above goes to some uses of my ratings, click here for a key to the ratings. Obviously, this wasn't a scientific experiment, it was just for fun. But because I had no serious preconceived end in mind, I had an open mind and learned a lot.
The problem is you won't turn out to be right or wrong. You'll be both alleged right and alleged wrong because each side will pay for biased studies. It's not that good science is not done, it's that bad science is done, too.
See Ron Rivest's very interesting paper on chaffing and compare his theory of security through what amounts to a formalized and theoretically sound notion of smokescreen with the way the market is going.
I think in the end it will be something where people make up their minds and we just have to vote and hope. But I would hope we vote for freedom if we're unsure because freedoms lost are hard to get back. There probably is some occasional effect of violence in movies against weak minds, but the effect of lost freedom is not without tangible cost and I weigh the latter more heavily in my own book of public accounting. No scientific survey will ever sort that out.
For most of us, though, video games still come down to choice. Does letting someone pull a trigger not also let them not pull it? Rather than removing violence, maybe we should focus more on seeing the consequence of violence. In the studies I've chosen to believe (heh), the idea of consequence-free violence is closer to the root of problems than the mere choice of violence.
The Sims, for example, is full of ways to torture people to death with no consequence to the player. I might argue that practice, bloodless as it is, was worse than a game with guns that lets you rescue a princess or save a hostage or a nation, which some might argue instills basic values.
And what about movies, which offer no choice but force you to just ride the course. How is this better than sitting in a movie where you want the violence to stop but can't make it stop without leaving the people you came with. At least a video game gives you a choice at each moment.
It might be kinda cool, actually, if some movies were more videogame-like and you could press a button saying "no more of this kind of scene please" and it would dynamically tone things down for either just you or for the whole of an audience if everyone voted likewise... Then seeing the movie multiple times would give you a different experience every time, too, which would be great for the movie houses...
Recently, watching the Da Vinci Code movie, I marveled at how we have movies that allow PG-13 to contain "disturbing violent images" but only mild sex. There's a lot of sex not in that movie that's in the book. But the violence that was only passing in the book is really graphic in the movie. My conclusion was that the government cares only about limiting sex and not violence. p>
Now I read here that the government cares about violence in video games. Why not in movies?
It's the random way in which the government incoherently stabs us with little points of pain rather than ever creating any notion of consistent policy that troubles me way more than just whether they want ratings on video games or not.
I wouldn't care if they rated all video games heavily for sex and violence, and then left it to the market what to buy. But when they rate some but not all, regulate some but not all, what's the point? The only obvious result I see is the eventual strangulation of all US business by litigation.
Actually, the patent system does not protect ideas. No intellectual property does. The patent system protects a way of doing something useful and novel as a way of incentivizing creation. The problem is that ways of doing things are being cranked out so fast that their very speed of being cranked out is a prove of non-novelty, yet people are capitalizing them economically as if they were a proof of "infringement", which they often are not. That an idea about how to do something is easy to recreate should be proof of non-novelty and a defense against infringement, not a source of income. And that's why the software patent system is broken: because in the digital marketplace, a lot of the good algorithms are practically forced. It's like giving patents on addition and subtraction, when you know these ideas would come anyway.
I agree that software patents are an unnecessary headache, but I think it's because software patents are just different than things like material process patents, and I propose dealing with them very differently, more like the Nobel prizes, but I'm not so sure I have a strong position on patents in general, as long as they run in a reasonable period of time and don't start doing like copyrights where they keep getting extended all the time to last closer and closer to forever.
It bugs me though, that people move so fluidly between discussions of software patents and discussions of GPL as if it were all one kind of thing. Copyrights are protections of work done, and the likelihood that two people will write the same software system is close to zero, so there's little harm in protecting the expression of someone's program. If they want to let someone use it, let them. If they don't, let that person write something else.
I don't see that someone's copyright protection infringes the world, since recreation of an idea in another form is not an infringement, only direct copying. It's the fact that patents make even independent creation into an offense that makes it a problem where copyright is not. People who need to get around a copyright can just head to a clean room and work their way through. People who need to get around a patent can't even claim as a defense "we raised the authors on Alpha Centauri and they never heard of this patent, so couldn't have infringed it". In fact, I suspect the whole patent system will necessarily collapse as soon as we open trade relations with another intelligent race, who will surely have a different theory of what has and has not been invented and will think different things to have "prior art" (not to mention different things to be "obvious"). When is First Contact scheduled for again?
Yes, it's true. It's always been true that we've trusted things we heard from well-known places. But in the past, we couldn't amplify that very much beyond ourselves. In the modern world, the issue isn't just "how much do you believe" but "how much effect can you have?". Because you can read something flakey on one site, launder the source of the info, appear to be a new source and accidentally confirm the information, that's bad. Because you can start a grassroots national campaign for the impeachment or promotion of someone, that's bad (if based on falsehoods). And so on. People in the past had to work harder.
It's something like the question of spam. People always had the possibility of flooding your mailbox with spam even in the physical world. The problem isn't that the net added this capability, it's that it changed the economics of it. And that is new. So people who fear the effect are not just repeating the same old fears, they have legitimate new ones.
Even if you conquer Zero Gee with Artificial Gravity, you haven't entirely solved the Toilets in Space problem. Especially when it comes to filling stations in space. After all, filling stations on earth often don't have the cleanest toilets. How are we going to keep them cleaner in space?
Wait, don't say it! I'm one orbit ahead of you... Illegal aliens: Doing the jobs our astronauts (and filling station attendants) won't do.
Actually, a bigger problem (not to take away from your point, but to underscore it) is that everyone not in the database is not a suspect. So when you hear them say they have it "narrowed down to two people", of course they mean "it's either these two or perhaps 6 billion not on record, or even 1 million of those who might match all they searched for". But you just know they're going to spend more time harassing those they have data on than on the other 1 million that would have matched if they were on file, too.
On the other hand, I think it's inevitable that these databases will happen. At some level, I'd rather we start moving ahead to create laws on how such info can and cannot be used than worrying about stopping the inevitable. Perhaps that's giving up. But it's practical.
Rather than telling insurance companies they can't have the data, I'd rather say they cannot discriminate in how they use it. Because at least then we can start to take statistical data on who they deny insurance to or who they fail to pay quickly and we can start to see if they are being fair. As long as this is secret, then only they can know if they are discriminating, since it becomes a "risk" to give a watchdog organization the data they should be watching for, and that's a problem right in oversight...
Let me say first that I distinguish RSI from carpal tunnel in a basic way. I think RSI is a problem that is going to happen regardless of posture and that is just about the simple question of whether any signal we send to repetitively through our system is bad for us. I think people become open to RSI because of the R, the repetition, and we should be wary of tasks that ask people to become machines. "People are good at judgment. Machines are good at repetition." People should not be doing the tasks of machines.
But carpal tunnel is very different. I have had friends fall victim to this, and I've seen them point to all manner of things to deny what seems totally obvious to me, and yet what I see no press play about: A lot of people who spend their time at a desk are not football players. They have not trained themeselves for years to be strong. That's just an observation, not a criticism. The weakest among us often prefer desk jobs. And some of them end up victim to the fact that desk jobs have their physical stresses.
At the risk of angering my insurance company, I should say that for 30 years I've sat with posture that is not perfect. I've rested my hands on my desk. I've worked long hours. And my typing is fine. Yet others I've known haven't survived 2 years of light typing. Why the difference? I can't believe it's typing.
Looking around at those who do and those who don't, I see weak-wristed people who have problems and strong-wristed people who don't. What did I do as a kid? I swam (with my arms, never kicking enough) competitively for a number of years. I bowled, using at least one wrist heavily. And I played baseball--again sport that uses the wrist. I played volleyball (lots of wrist there) and ping-pong (same). I did tetherball (very strong wrist use). And I loved the horizontal bar (pullups, and pulling my whole body over the bar). It doesn't surprise me, then, that as an adult, my wrists had nice broad cord strength going through whatever the bone structure was there. My arms were always very strong, and it's served me well programming. Probably plenty for a robust typing life.
If you're a kid, or you know one, or have one, who wants to be into computers, I recommend sports. And particular those sports--the ones about wrists. I just don't see the problem. Then again, typing itself from an early age may well build a generation of kids whose bones grow up knowing they'll need this strength. So it may just be those who are late to learn typing that end up with the problem. Still, a bit of swimming and those other things won't have hurt you any...
Maybe what I'm advocating is less PC style posture, and more Mac-style posture, since the Mac commercials seem to be more about getting out and doing physical things with your computer on your belt...
Sorry, but everyone seems to take offense at everything here, so I've learned to just assume I should worry, and to write very defensively. Sigh. Glad to know there are others besides myself here who just come to offer and receive information, not to fight.
Likewise with Lisp if you needed it, you could always write a few subroutines in C/C++ and there are packages for doing "foreign" (some say it should be called "native") callout very straightforwardly. e.g., although Lisp will do array processing, if I had routines already optimized for doing (un)compression, display algorithms, raster effects, numerical algorithms, etc. I might just call those directly. The modern environment is heterogeneous, and the good implementations of CL accomodate that even though the standard stops short. It's enough similar that if you have to share between multiple implementations or you write in one and later port to another, it's likely to be a pretty modular accommodation.
CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System) is pretty much the reference model for a good object system based on multiple inheritance. It's powerful, efficient, and flexible.
I haven't used ELK so can't compare directly. In general, the Scheme standard is small and what made it usable was often the implementation details. (CL is bigger, so more of its usable stuff is common to all implementations, but even then, there are new things that are post-standard that are common to most implementations, yet really not standard.) Scheme has traditionally placed more of a premium on aesthetics and teachability, while CL more explicitly on the reverse (practicality over aesthetics). Traditionally, it has been individual Scheme vendors, rather than the language itself, that have had to tend to pragmatics, which has left some Scheme implementations hugely more usable than others. Common Lisp has been traditionally pragmatic, so the individual implementations, while they do vary somewhat, also tend to care about commonality more because that sense of shared community is built into the language itself. (I sat on both the Scheme authors committee for a number of years and on the CL design committee, so it gave me an interesting view of the differences, but I'm always fascinated to hear how users perceive it, since they often don't see either the intent or the process, just the effect.)
If you want a flavor of what the Common Lisp condition system offers, you could see my 1990 paper and my 2001 paper, each of which touch on this in different ways.
Common Lisp has built in hash ta
There are fewer Common Lisp programmers than Java programmers, to be sure. And sometimes they may be harder to find and/or more expensive if you're just measuring per-person without regard to how the language enables one. But a well-written large program in Common Lisp will be more flexible and more easily maintained by fewer people than an equivalent large program in another language, at least in my experience. So I personally think the comparison is quite favorable.
Some have said that there are good and bad programmers in all languages, and that may well be true. But then, I've heard very few good programmers in Common Lisp complain that the language ties their hands and that they wish they were using a "conventional" language; by contrast, I've heard the reverse (good programmers complaining that C/C++/Java ties their hands and they wish they were using Lisp) many times. Again, it could just be who I hang around with. I offer it only as something I've observed, not as incontrovertible fact.
But if I like a language, I'm not going to fail to recommend it just because others might disagree. Let the others who might disagree fail to recommend it. If a language's advocates don't speak for it, who will? I wasn't trying to start a language war, so much as surprised that you noted you had personally successfully used a language and yet wouldn't recommend it. I'm not even saying there can't be reasons for that--I was just curious what yours were.
I think the remarks others have made about cross-platform issues are good ones, but I would add to that one other important comment: Don't make a big fuss about why not to use VB unless you're prepared to offer a substitute. If you do have a substitute, focus on its good qualities rather than on VB's bad ones. Show what additional things you could do if only you had that other choice. Sounds more positive that way.
Common Lisp is industrial strength, scales well to large applications, and works cross-platform. For example, LispWorks offers a Common API (CAPI) that allows writing portable code for deploy on Mac/Windows/Linux.
Mostly I agree with your sentiment here, but on this particular comment, I wanted to note that there's a material difference between buying it from another company and from the same company. In the case of two companies, the first company can claim the things the second company is fixing are not things they knew about or thought of, and in so doing they might have some sort of vestige of a defense against claims they are negligent for not fixing it in their original product. In the case of the care being provided by the same company, the problem is that Windows already sells this facility, since the Windows Update facility presumably gets frequent security updates.
If you'd get all the same patches anyway, and you're just paying for getting them instantly instead of waiting for a daily polling mechanism, maybe that's reasonable. But if they're actually making a conscious decision "let's not give this fix out for free, let's hold it back from our normal distribution mechanism because people should have paid us more for this kind of protection", there it seems like users should be lining up to sue every time there's a fix that they can't get throught Windows Update and it leads to material damage.
Unlike in the case of two uncoordinated vendors, it would seem like it would be easier to show there was a conscious decision by Microsoft to withhold a fix, and although I'm not a lawyer, that sounds to me like it would make a big difference to jurors considering a liability case.
I've got to say, I have trouble with charging content providers even once, so I completely agree with this criticism of the proposed "revenue enhancing" technologys for the megacorps.
I used to post commentary to Salon's TableTalk until they changed their revenue policy to charge people who posted stuff for the right to post. People who posted stuff? They're a magazine. It seems absurd to charge writers but not subscribers. So I left. Obviously it didn't bring the empire down, but my point was to say "look, I'm not going to pay two ways: one by providing content and another by providing money to have that content delivered". People come to the site to read posts, and they charge advertisers for that. Getting readers is enough payment for me.
Similarly here, I think it's amazing that if you have a web site that is full of content, the internet has no mechanism to make sure you are economically rewarded. The promise of micropayments for having put up very elaborate sites full of information was never carried through because the big portal sites realized they could just take all that money for themselves--why pass it through? No one cares that it's my or your commentary that people are getting out of their browser. They just thank AOL or MSN or Google for finding it for them. And we who provide the myriad little details, blogs, maps, lists, and other things that make up the real fabric of the internet are not only not rewarded but are charged.
So when you talk about double-charging for that privilege, not single-charging, at some point I have to say everyone should go read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged , in which something very similar occurs, and what amount to "content providers" eventually say "enough is enough". Ayn Rand is controversial for her overall broad philosophy of Objectivism, which lots of people don't buy into wholesale. But I'm not advancing Objectivism here. I'm just saying the basic premise of the book, that sometimes enough is enough, is worth considering. The book is an interesting read regardless of your position on her larger scale philosophies.
And I'm all for creating reasonable fees on the Internet. I just don't think authors and other content providers should be charged for doing so. That's the very definition of not reasonable. Sort of like having kids charge their parents for raising them. Or charging teachers for the privilege of teaching. If no one reads the content someone provides, the cost of that content approaches zero since it's just a few bytes on an unused disk. If lots of people read them, then by definition the content contributes a lot to the world, and the world should contribute by each consumer chipping in, not by each consumer contributing to the content provider's eventual bankruptcy (or in less severe cases just negatively contributing to their financial success).
Also, I like Jesse Ventura's "government should do for people what they cannot do for themselves". The big portal companies are already capable of a great many sins; the mere presence of money enables that. What the law needs to protect are the individual content providers, who are not capable of protecting themselves because often they are denied (or made to work unreasonably hard for) any revenue stream from their efforts. If there's a need for a law, it's to protect the little guy, not to enable the big one.
I couldn't agree more. I've witnessed the effect first-hand. Not to detract from anything you had to say there, but hopefully instead to underscore and amplify it...
The truly sad thing is that politicians are not doing the math. The only thing that even allows this ridiculous fantasy that it's appropriate to focus resources on those left behind is that we haven't quite run out of money yet. But just wait...
Dollars invested at the high end (of achievers, I mean, not dollars invested on the well-to-do) pays back because those people will be able to get and keep jobs that will pay for whatever welfare we can afford. So that money is not wasted. What is wasted is failing to invest in making sure that those who could easily succeed really can, because that's leaving easily affordable productivity on the table. As more and more US students can't cut it in college, our colleges turn to teaching more and more people from abroad... for now... until we have no one left in the US with the knowledge needed to do the teaching. Then that, too, will collapse.
Education is supposed to be an investment, and it is not being treated as our largest strategic asset. It's being wasted as if it were non-threatening to do that.
And please note: I'm not saying to spend no money on the disadvantaged. I'm saying that there's a difference between "spending a modest amount to make sure that people who are within striking distance of succeeding can really succeed" and "spending every last dollar to make give those with really no hope of ever succeeding have the illusion that they got the same chance as everyone else".
(And note, I don't think we do as well as we could in helping to teach those who "no matter how many times it is presented to them cannot grasp it". I put a lot of that on the teachers and the school system, not just the students. But "just money" nor "catchy slogans" will fix it. There may be too few good teachers for all the school districts, and maybe a heap of bad ones protected here and there under tenure, but debating that seems to get us nowhere. There is an Internet now and we could be experimenting more with centralizing the creation of good lectures (not just lecture materials, but actual presentations, assignments, and even grading) such that everyone could have access to a substantial amount of help at very low incremental cost. Just as colleges have a professor do the teaching and then grad students handle the questions/answers, I think the public schools could invest a bit more in such tools. Yes, some teaching has to be personally dealt with, but if teacher prep time were reduced, and grading were centralized, the human teachers in the classroom would have more time to deal with special needs of Those Left Behind as well as those with extra questions trying to get ahead. Right now that time is frittered away replicating the basics (what will I say tomorrow? when will I get time to grade this?) in ways that the programmers among us would never permit programs we write to fritter away time in a production application... Also, those students who didn't "get it" on the first pass could watch again that evening with their parents instead of complaining they didn't hear what the teacher said and parents having no recourse. There is a lot we don't do technologically. But none of that will get done by just throwing money at the lower end and calling it by the catchy but misguided and misleading title No Child Left Behind.)
Realistic choices need to be made because the math of national economics will ultimately not lie. Some might argue that it's already not lying and that already the finances of this are hopelessly out of control. But whether we can turn around this particular unbelievable deficit/debt bubble or not, it's clear that if we continue to give away all that we have to people who are not putting back their fair share and we continue not to invest in people who can pay for the extravagance of that gift-giving, a reckoning will come.
With this kind of shrinkage, it sounds like a much worse problem than ozone layer depletion. Perhaps it's the effect of ever-increasing television and cell phone broadcasts over the past few decades, eroding our protection from the total vacuum of space. It sounds dangerous to me.
Time to write my Congressfolk and ask them if they have a position on this... They'll know. They always seem to be on top of everything I write them about.
You must read different sci-fi than I do. I feel that sci-fi's purpose is to explore what might happen in the future, to include the problems. The only sci-fi story I've read about the skytower is Ben Bova's Mercury, and the author makes it plain early in the book (hence I think no "spoiler warning" is required here for me to remark on it) that his view of the skytower is ... uh ... not 100% rosy.
Stories, whether written in litereature or in TV or movies, are the implementation mechanism by which society plays out an idea in its head before doing something to see whether it likes where it goes. For the collective consciousness to work properly, and for society to move forward in an informed way, it has to be free to explore both the positive and negatives.
Doing great, noble, historical things is not accomplished by a blind rush toward the first thing that the Guiness book of records says has never been tried, but rather by stretching for things that are, with due thought, within our technical grasp ... and socially proper. Nuclear weapons, for example, was arguably rushed through the approval process without due consideration for the social implications. Some might argue, and have argued, that a skytower might fall (so to speak) in the same category. SciFi is one of the most effective vehicles ever invented for exploring such questions.
I think I said pretty clearly that I expected there might be conferences where this was expected, so this refutes nothing of what I said.
What makes Stallman's position questionable is, when you cut away all the guff, that his underlying claim is based on the notion that there are "good" and "bad" ways to earn money. He holds himself out as someone who wants to be judged in this light and he will be judged differently by different people for what he does. But I think it's fair to impose a stricter standard upon him than on the average person on the street who's just trying to make a buck.
In this regard, one of Stallman's implicit claims is that "other people do it" or "I do it because I can" are not adequate defenses of why one makes money. Hence, if he will deny either of those to others, he must deny those defenses to himself. If "it's customary to charge money for software" is a good enough reason, a lot of the debate on free software would go away. So let him defend himself however he likes, but if it comes down to "other people do it", he's undermined his whole political movement.
What he seems to many to be saying is how people should structure a theory of economics from first principles. And so my arguments are from first principles. My argument on the California law was not "what does it give a person a right to" nor "whose right is defended", but rather "what are the material elements one must take into consideration in deciding such a case". The law extends protection to workers only in the case where various material considerations are satisfied. I looked to that law not for precedent in terms of outcome, but in terms of considered thought on material elements. Venue seems to me a material element.
In any case, my role here isn't to convince every last person nor even to assert there's a definitive answer, only to lay out an alternate point of view because I tire of these discussions being one-sided. I've done that, and I'll hold to that. Invite me to your conference sometime (for a fee, of course) and I'll debate it until the late hours with you. And if you can find me while I'm out in public milling about at that conference, incidentally, just mention that you read this post and the autograph I give you will be free.
It's reasonable to raise this, but I don't think this can be a dominating claim.
In any place of business, you pay workers for only a period of time. That doesn't mean that on premises they can set themselves up in a shop and capitalize on the people that have come to your business for their own economic gain. If I write a book "on my own time" while full-time employed and my employer isn't going to claim ownership, my contract says it has to be not just on my own time but on my own premises/equipment for it to be free and clear. (I'm pretty sure some places--the State of California [California Labor code section 2870] is an example--codify this obvious bit of common sense into law.)
The situation in a conference may be somewhat more gray, but not completely.
As someone who's been a speaker at a number of conferences, I know I have at least some responsibility to the venue not to work against what it is that they've brought me in for. It's common for book authors to sell their books (though I've never seen book authors charge for autographs--it's usually seen as a sales tool to encourage buying). Most conferences don't mind on-site sale of books because it serves attendees, but if a conference said "we don't want you selling your book here", I think it would be a reasonable request. (The most likely reasons would be traffic patterns, fire regulations [too many people], equity of investment, and overall happiness of the attending conference members--who if they get angry enough won't come back next year.) Most speakers would find it still well worth their time to conform to requests to avoid sales and simply raise visibility of their name/image.
There's probably a legal basis for saying the conference organizer's will should dominate, but even just appealing to common sense: If the people running the convention can't control how their convention runs, they can't assure its success or failure on their own terms, and are less likely to offer to host conventions. I would not begrudge Stallman for saying in advance that he was going to do this (though I would recommend that the conference advertise the fact in order to keep people who come from having their expectations violated). I would not begrudge him for saying he'd not want to be photographed. Or he might say meet me later offsite and I'll sign for you under my own terms. But in this latter case, the restaurant or hotel he directed them to might have their own rules. A small number of people exchanging money might not offend a hotel, but if you have lines around the lobby or building, they might insist that you rent a room to avoid clogging things for other people. Venue matters, and one cannot just set up a free enterprise on someone else's property (owned or rented).
Of course, these are just my opinions. I'm not saying I run the world. I'm saying that it's not surprising people objected. And I'm saying that to the extent that he thinks he has a moral cause to press, that moral cause is met by other moral causes pushing back. I'm just articulating the basic framework that some of those forces of pushing back might reasonably take.
I'm not sure it's entirely relevant to this discussion (so I've pre-emptively removed my automatic +1 Karma bonus), but since you ask: I went to and worked at MIT, where I studied at and worked in the Lab for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab. Appropriately for my tag line, I have a BS in Philosophy.
By way of appropriate disclosure: Stallman's not a pal of mine, but I came out of the same environment as he did, with quite different views on the world than he did. I contributed to early (Teco-based) Emacs and to Lisp Machines, so we had various interactions over those.
I'm sometimes seen as opposing him personally, since my view often differs from his, but mostly I just seek to present an alternate point of view on a topic that calls for many voices and often doesn't get them.
I'm sometimes even accused of being a troll, but that's an oversimplification. I try hard to keep my arguments non-personal to the degree possible. Personalities and experience influence the details of this discussion greatly, so it's often necessary for us to discuss such matters. But we can't shy away from venturing opinions merely because personalities sometimes get mixed in. These are issues that objectively affect all of us, and understanding them involves not shying away from every angle of an issue where points of view do matter.
To my knowledge, there's no patent on gif decoding--only on the encoding. The patent is on gif creation. Lots of GPL'd tools accept gifs.
Count me in the camp that says "kleenex" when I mean "facial tissue". Hand me a "kleenex" doesn't mean I won't take a Scottie. Xerox may wish I didn't have that usage, but that's Xerox's problem, not mine.
Likewise I just use the term gif because it's easy to pronounce. (Yeah, I know, png is encouraged to be pronounced ping, but it doesn't mean people understand me when I do.) I didn't mean to exclude accepting .png's, .jpg's, .tiff's, .bmp's, or whatever you like, nor did I specify the output format.
Of curiosity, do you know this in some authoritative way or are you speculating? I didn't see this stated in the article.
You could, I suppose, test this by making a GPL'd program (to eliminate red herring objections based on your market paradigm) that uses a picture of Stallman (with a rectangle missing) and merges a gif you give it of yourself to that photo, and then give your program away as freeware (perhaps for media-cost on a disk you brought to one of his events). Like with any free software, you could get your grins from trying to drive down the market price of the original idea to a more "tolerable" level... zero, being the canonical tolerable level.
His primary point (made in the article), that fans have no inherent right to his time is right in principle. However, when you make yourself available for an event and especially if you're already paid for the event, it gets more questionable. [Credential: I've hosted a conference at which RMS spoke. He wanted a fee, which I had no objection to. Where feasible, speakers should get paid for time and travel. There are fortunately speakers who sometimes have the resources and interest to travel and/or speak where they can't be reimbursed, but it's not an obligation on speakers. Speaking takes prep time and time to do. And, in my limited experience, Stallman rightly insisted on being reimbursed for such things.] But if he had arrived and started charging people at my event for his services while he was on "our time", I'd have found that to be "double billing" (at best) and would have strongly considered kicking him out on the street on the spot.
Perhaps the conference event people approved of his action in advance. Or perhaps they didn't think to object on this basis. I suspect there's also a question at a conference on free software whether it's "his" conference. It may be his topic, but the ownership of time and conferences is something where I'd follow the money. Perhaps the conference had him as their guest speaker and didn't want to offend him even when he offended them. I don't know the full fact pattern, so am substituting questions for people to ask in order to speak on the issue. But Stallman speaks as if this were simply an issue of signer's rights, he's oversimplifying by not similarly qualifying his advice to others according to forum/venue, which certainly influences any discussion of rights.
It'd be quite another thing entirely if this fee were asked on his own time (say, when someone finds him in a restaurant or hotel or out on the street where he's not already scheduled). I might then argue that the fee was too low. Fans should not have their right to inject themselves upon unwilling celebrity in their private lives. But I don't see that that's what's going on here.
Hear, hear!
I was going to say something similar, that is, that the only real way out is to pull a Dallas.
Star Trek's big contribution to the world is not about space stuff, it's about humanity:
It's not just the little morality plays of the first series. When they went to the big screen, they made the huge mistake of assuming we just all wanted to see a rehash of the same old faces, without the substance. The result was a seriously bad movie, unquestionably the worst of the Star Trek movies and arguably bad by many standards. Then they followed with one of the best movies of all time, not just best of Star Trek, best of any movie. It's in my all-time top-10.
Wrath of Kahn is not only an outstandingly well put together movie, but it broke ground on movies in a new way that, to my knowledge, had not been seriously done before, or not that effectively. Instead of treating the aging of a character as a weakness (as in Bond or Superman movies where they eventually replace the actor but always behave as if he does not age), they turned it to a strength and taught us about aging. They let the character's wisdom grow and they presented not just seasoned actors but characters befitting those seasoned actors.
To do it in reverse, is to return to the Bond/Superman fallacy--that what we want is more of the people. Sure we do, if we could. But their time has largely come and gone and we cannot go back. That was the message of the Star Trek movies. Life moves on, and you live with it.
To try to restart those characters is to ask for too much. It is to take no risks. Gene took a risk with Next Generation in going to a new crew, and showed the formula could survive the transition. But those entrusted with Gene's legacy didn't stick to formula in Enterprise, and now the studio has learned nothing and wants to simply return to clinging to straws rather than analyze the mistakes.
It's not inconceivable that a trip to Star Fleet academy could make an excellent series, but it's handicapped by trying to lock into Kirk and Spock. Get new characters.
What really killed Enterprise was a lack of purpose. I hope they reanalyze the purpose, or the "motive" as so many actors would say... "What's my motive?" The studio's motive seemed to be money and greed and milking a thought-naive audience, and the not-so-naive audience called them on it.
Star Trek took risks, but could reinvent itself weekly. Another thing Enterprise blew was that the new framework was so constraining (the long-arc time-travel story) that when it didn't work, there was no easy out. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Solicit stories from the community. Take some chances.
An academy might be about the unwritten future, except that we've already read the future. We know who will live and who will die unless there are new characters. That eliminates suspense. Enterprise also missed a huge chance to be funny. It presented a world before everything technological was debugged, and where the storylines might be as much about technical failure as success. But then it never used that. Will this new series really use its campus to its capability? It won't if it ties its hands too much with constraints of other series... Let it go free.
I don't see how it could be otherwise.
First, the phone company already knows that the best way to index phone number is by soundex, to avoid massive problems caused by the fact that many people don't know the correct spellings of their friends' and associates' names. And they certainly aren't sounding like this will be the first domain indexed by soundex.
Second, it's unlikely that domain ownership will be a prerequisite to having a phone number. I don't think they could sell that. (In fact, they might realistically make more by saying they were going to give away the domain with your name and invent a service called ... hmmm, let's see... how about the "unlisted domain" where the customer pays money to keep from being locatable.)
Third, phone numbers have the virtue of being uncorrelated with a name. That's what makes them resolvable in ambiguity--they act as a cross-check to make sure you got it right. When you can't quite remember a number and think it's either 555-1234 or 555-1235 and then check information to find the first is for "Sam Smith" and the second for "Alex Jones", there's little doubt how to resolve things. But if you thought the number was 1387.Sam.Smith.com or 1386.Sam.Smith.com or maybe 1387.Samuel.Smith.com or maybe 1386.Samuel.Smith or 1387.Sam.Smythe.com or... Obviously finding out that the mis-remembered number matches a lot of same-named people won't help at all. (If you believe in correlating names with telephones this way, it's a short conceptual hop to believing that a .pw domain would help you remember your password.)
If you can't autogenerate good phone numbers (i.e., tell people what name they're supposed to use), as I and many others here have argued you can't, what's the alternative? Allow people to choose? Gads, with all the domain squatting it's clear that this would allow much choice to a rich few and little choice to most people. And so it would not be fair at all. The fairest thing I can imagine is to not involve ICANN at all.
And besides, back to the original point about this being a ploy to sell domain registries, if I wanted to have the domain system already remember my phone number, why wouldn't I just have people do nslookup on the names I already own? They already require domain owners to list their phone numbers.
is that computational linguistics still hasn't been able to make reasonable progress into Pragmatics
Two quick points, one regular, one meta...
First, I wanted to say something more but didn't want to read all the posts to see if I was duplicating. So thank you for saying essentially the same thing as I was going to say. That is, that mostly this shows up the limitations of full text search and that I hope Google and others are investing in better forms of search. The whole point of full text search was to take un-marked-up text and just use it as is. Having to change your un-marked-up text to be "even less marked up" is the wrong way to go. Alta Vista and its successors were on the right track before by saying we must build tools that accomodate language as it is written and index it in spite of itself. This is no time to turn back.
Second, in the meta level, I was happy not to have to search the entire text of everything people wrote to find this. I just read all the level 5 posts (not many) and then scanned the unattached posts for an interesting headline that would give me the hint of someone describing the limits of computational linguistics. Your post, here titled "All this tell us..." was perfect to allow me to select its content on first try, avoiding a bunch of posts probably on other topics. But this header would be terrible for full text searches as currently implemented. Anyway, I thought it was great that this message and its subject itself were an existence proof of the claim that was made within the post.
Tools will continue to evolve, but the data we're searching is a static record. If we dumb down an entire culture to to accomodate our current tools, when we get better tools will one of them be something that un-dumbs-down the time period from 2005-2010 when we though dumbing things down was necessary? Or will it just look to people of the future like we had a sudden five year interval of being idiots?
p.s. Mod parent up.
A good point and a fine concern. Then again, to speak in overly general terms, all news stories are written by the AP and then re-packaged by anything from the New York Times to USA Today to look like there was a different source. So in effect we offer the same service today. Every newstand offers, again to overly general round numbers, the same news from three different rewriters and people today are informed enough to know which lens they want to view that raw news through.
You're right in practice that what I'm suggesting offers much more refined control and many opportunities to lose one's place navigating. So I don't know, maybe it's not the right thing. Maybe what I'm suggesting is a regression to the days when my ATM used to ask me every day whether I was an English speaker, until some clever programmer figured out that I probably mostly speak the same language every day and then just remembered my answer once and didn't ask again. Maybe people who read the Times yesterday read it again today, and don't go back and forth between simple or advanced wordings on a moment by moment basis.
But then, the net has surprised us before about showing us that there are more use-cases than publishers ever expected. And by making the cost of trying the experiment low enough, we can bypass the wisdom of the big publishers and jump to the real truth of what end users want. So perhaps it's worth doing just because the cost of failure isn't inordinately high and the potentials if it shows something interesting are worth the modest effort involved.